If you’ve visited since we re-opened in March, you will have seen the hard work that has been invested in getting Kitchen Garden back to a clear, cohesive structure.

Here we meet Stephen, Gabby and Lauren who, together with our brilliant volunteers, cultivate over 200 types of fruit, veg and flowers for sale and donation to food charities.

Meet Gabby McKenzie

I’m part of the Kitchen Garden team with responsibility for overseeing the repair and running of the glasshouse. This involves planning what we grow, managing the harvest for donation and retail, and supporting the delivery of the community programme.  

How did you become a kitchen gardener?

I trained as a product designer and had a career working in London-based design agencies. After a career break to bring up my daughters, I wanted to change career direction. I tried out being a printmaker and a picture framer but ended up choosing to become a kitchen gardener. I studied RHS level 2 at Capel Manor and volunteered at The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in their community allotment and the Temperate House. I have also worked supporting community events at Kew. As well as gardening, I still have a love of design and making and bring creativity and practical skills to my role.

Growing up, my mum was a proud allotment owner and although I was reluctant to help and often refused to try whatever she cooked for us, I eventually fell in love with gardening, growing, and eating vegetables!

What do you love about your job?

I am interested in the journey from seed sowing through to the human connections built around food and I appreciate the wellbeing benefits from growing, cooking and eating within a community setting.

Meet Stephen Histed

My main responsibilities are the growing cut flowers, looking after our vast array of fruit and keeping our ornamental standards high. I also work with our various community groups, leading them as volunteers, giving demonstrations or just making them feel at home in the garden.

How did you become a kitchen gardener?

I’ve always loved being outdoors. I spent a lot of time as a kid searching for bugs, falling in ponds and sowing seeds in my relative’s gardens (as well as stealing the fruit and veg that they grew!). This led me to studying environmental science and then biodiversity at university, where I had a focus on ecology and entomology. I moved through a few different careers (including plumbing and tech), before realising, with a nudge from the pandemic, that horticulture is where my skills and passion overlap. I started volunteering at a few gardens, including for Chiswick House & Gardens Trust, and was fortunate enough to be considered for a permanent role when one came up.

My academic background is in environment and biodiversity, so every decision I make in the garden has environmental impact front and centre. My aim at Chiswick is to create a Kitchen Garden where environmental benefit, visitor experience and crop productivity are perfectly balanced.

What do you love about your job?

I love the challenge of managing a space for visitors, wildlife and productivity, and really enjoy trying to find ways to ensure all three of these needs are met within our garden. I’m a wildlife gardener and I make sure that we’re not only doing all we can to support and enhance local wildlife, but also educating our visitors about what they can do too.

I’m also really in to growing cut flowers and have plans to ramp up production so we’re producing buckets and buckets of local, sustainable flowers. I’m big into fruit trees and how they can work from both a productive an ornamental perspective. I’ve been doing a lot of work to restore and enhance the trees we have to make them more productive and beautiful to look at all year round.

I’m really looking forward to the prospect of being able to make small edits and developments with our planting to really show off the space. I’m also currently looking at ways in which we can introduce open water to the garden as this has a huge benefit for local biodiversity. We have a really clear vision of making a garden that benefits community and wildlife whilst using sustainable and organic approaches and is conscious of the impacts climate change will continue to make, and I’m really excited to be a part of that journey.

Meet Lauren Jennings

I am an apprentice with the Kitchen Garden team. My apprenticeship is a two-year course, kindly funded by the Linbury Trust. My week is split between three days in the Kitchen Garden and one day within the grounds. I also go to Capel Manor College one day a week to study for a Level 2 in Horticulture. It’s the most perfect apprenticeship for me as I love how I am learning and getting involved in new things every day. There’s so much opportunity for growth.

How did you become a kitchen gardener?

I’ve tried my hand at many different jobs, from bar managing, youth leader, assistant grain miller to growing mycelium as packaging. I never really knew what I wanted to do so I tried a multitude of things to see what fit.

I quit university three months into my course and started volunteering at community gardens around London. The sense of community, a feeling of healing from having my hands in the soil and being able to grow something to eat just felt incredible. I have always had a love for food and nutrition so I did a short course in organic food growing and got a little obsessed with soil and edible crops since then. Several years on I found this apprenticeship. I now know that horticulture is the right route for me.

What do you love about your job?

Getting the growing spaces in shape with lots of mulch, sowing seeds of many different varieties of veg and herbs and planning for our produce cart.

We are also creating an edible flower and tea production garden which two of our lovely community groups are helping to make. This will be up and running in June/July with the idea of all the herbs and flowers grown can be used to make teas and infusions. We will also be planting some of our camellia sinensis collection which we can experiment making our own English breakfast and green teas.

I have become very excited about green manures!

Chiswick’s Kitchen Garden is always an exciting place to work, there are endless opportunities of learning and so many projects to work on to create a space for more biodiversity and inclusion for everyone.

The Kitchen Garden is open Thursday–Sunday, 11am–4pm, until Sunday 29 October. Tickets from £2.25. Book here.

Free unlimited entry for Members (and a guest). Join as a Member.